Advertising Week Europe 2024: Navigating the new media landscape

Media and entertainment (M&E) companies have experienced rapid change in recent years, driven by the accelerated adoption of new viewing platforms, changing consumer behavior, and evolving business models. M&E organizations recognize the need for data-driven advertising and increasingly focus on monetizing content while containing costs.

At the same time, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Advertiser-supported business models have always been—and will continue to be—based on the same fundamentals: delivering the right advertising to the right audience, at the right place, and at the right frequency. In a complex media landscape, it’s a challenge for M&E companies to navigate, innovate, and stay aligned to fundamentals.

Advertising Week Europe, celebrating its tenth year in London in May 2024, is a gathering of marketing, advertising, technology, and brand professionals tackling the biggest issues shaping the industry today. At the event, Nina Walsh, Global Leader, AWS Industry Business Development for Media, Entertainment, Games, and Sports sat down with Dan Cohen, Director, Product & Advertising Innovation at Sky Media for a fireside chat to discuss how Sky is navigating the path forward and adapting to deliver and monetize content across multiple platforms, increase viewer engagement and retention, and enhance personalized experiences.

The session, Navigating the New Media Landscape with Sky, offered attendees a chance to hear first-hand how companies like Sky are approaching ad monetization, data-driven audience strategies, and future innovation. Following are the highlights from the conversation:

Simplification

Given the complexities of the modern media landscape and viewing environment, a viable path forward is to simplify. Converged TV ad sales requires simplifying and unifying the linear and digital advertising ecosystem. This is challenging from a tech perspective, particularly for traditional media companies building on top of legacy platforms. As Cohen notes, “We’ve got legacy systems that we need to work with and we build on top of these…There is a definite challenge in this new fragmented market to make all the technology work together.”

Sky’s approach is to return to fundamentals. And to build a solution that starts with the audience, rather than the platform. To put it simply, “We’ll help you find your audience. It doesn’t matter where they are.” This manifests as One Campaign, Sky’s thriving cross-platform proposition, which connects addressable audiences across linear, on-demand and digital.

Data-driven viewer experiences

Media companies need to leverage all sources of data to improve the viewer experience. As Cohen notes, “From the start, we’ve been connecting viewing data, first party data, and third-party data to create opportunities to target customers properly.”

It’s important to take both customer and advertiser considerations into account. “Customer experience is hugely important. The other side is we try to make sure advertisers get the best possible experience as well,” says Cohen. Balancing ad load with the viewer experience is of paramount importance. “We do a lot of research into what our ad load should be to balance that customer experience,” he says. Optimizing this tradeoff, however, requires high-quality data. Cohen asserts, “Good data will become even more vital than it is now… As we move into a world where outcomes become more and more important, the quality of the underlying data is going to be even more important for delivering the best possible returns.”

Innovation

With change comes the opportunity for innovation. Media companies seek ways to innovate in today’s marketplace, which must be driven by customer needs. Cohen sums this up by saying that first “we need to define the use case”. This is particularly true for generative AI: “Generative AI can be absolutely brilliant….but we’ve still got to define why we’re using it. It can really help to define audiences, but we need to dig in a little more to the use cases”.

Data also drives innovation: “We constantly evolve with the data that we use in terms of bringing in new data sets and new ways of doing things.” Owning the platform and the content also affords the opportunity to experiment with next gen solutions, with Cohen identifying shoppable TV as “one to watch”.

In the end, this all ties together to create more actionable monetization opportunities for media companies like Sky. As market pressure increases, M&E organizations are becoming increasingly focused on advertiser outcomes, in addition to the fundamentals of reach and price. As Cohen concludes, “Data and outcomes will continue to be areas where we have to evolve… It’s going to be tricky to navigate the jump from the traditional space around reach and price into outcomes, but at Sky with our platforms, partners, content, and quality data at scale we’re confident we’re in a strong position to deliver for customers and brand .”

To learn more about how Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help companies optimize monetization while making the leap forward from traditional media into a multi-platform reality visit: https://aws.amazon.com/media/monetization/